The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.

Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.

And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head.

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.